Namwali Serpell and Kortney Morrow on Toni Morrison’s Paradise

Toni Morrison didn’t want a monument or statue erected in her honor; she wanted a dedicated reading room in her hometown public library, a space that could allow for change and continuous engagement with her work. In this episode, Namwali Serpell visits the Toni Morrison Reading Room in the Lorain Public Library, before heading to a tour event at the CityClub Cleveland to open up a passage from Morrison’s novel Paradise alongside poet and writer Kortney Morrow.

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From the podcast:

Kortney Morrow: When I read the opening sentences from Paradise, “None of it was as good as what they learned at home sitting on the floor in a firelit room listening to war stories, to stories of great migrations,”, I really thought that these were stories of their own ancestors because this novel really does span the course of Black history in the United States, and also a little Native American history, and I almost felt silly when the line after says, “all there in the one book they owned then,” because what I read was so much more expansive than a book.

Namwali Serpell: Yeah, I think there’s this sense that they are telling their own war stories, but they’re finding a kind of resonance or echo in the Bible, which I think is also what we’re supposed to do when we read Morrison, right? We find resonance with the stories that she tells. But I think you’re right that the expansion or the sense of range in these stories, “war stories, stories of great migrations, failures and triumphs, fear, bravery, confusion, all there in the one book they owned.” It’s like all this has just gotten contained into this one box, right? And in a similar way, Deke and his brother have a desire to contain all of Black history in these towns, which are just as rigid and orderly, right? The streets, the houses, as the pages of a book itself.

KM: That’s fascinating. Yeah, this line, “The side streets seemed to him as satisfactory as ever.” I kept thinking, you have to be a particular type of person to find side streets satisfactory. But also, I know that person. I know about five of them.

NS: And those streets are named after the disciples and apostles. And so the streets also are the Bible. Right? It’s like this, the grid of the city and the grid of that book are the map of Deacon’s life.

KM: I think a lot about this last line, idleness, and just the main tension in the novel. And to me, this question of how to build towards freedom, it’s a question we’re still asking right now. And I thought about, a line I recently read in MLK’s Stride Toward Freedom, which was an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner, where he writes something like, “The person who believes that the path to racial justice is a one-lane road is the first to cause the traffic jam.”

NS: Wow, that is perfect. That is a perfect line for this, yeah.

KM: It also conjured up something for me, Etheridge Knight, the poet, who has a poem called “A Fable”, and there are 7 prisoners, all African American prisoners, who are stuck in a prison, and each believe they know the way out, and they are adamant that this is the only way, and they spend all their time debating which is the way out that they remain stuck. And wow, those things were on my mind as I was wrestling with this book, and I think this passage kind of pulled that out of me.

NS: Yeah, I think that’s a perfect kind of metaphor for the question of containment, which Morrison was really interested in. I think her first children’s book that she co-wrote with her son was called The Big Box, and it’s essentially a story about incarceration. It’s about children who get locked in this big box, and they’re asking about their own freedom. They’re asking, “How do you know what my freedom is?” So this tension between the younger generation seeking freedom and the older generation seeking freedom is something she’s always been interested in. And I think it manifests in this novel, interestingly, both as a conflict between this very orderly vision of a paradise, an all-Black utopia in Ruby, versus the convent, which is this unruly, female space. And we know it’s not racially pure because as Morrison begins this novel, she says, “They shoot the white girl first.” So we know there’s at least one white girl, right? So there’s a kind of war between these two versions of paradise that’s very much being set up here. But I think what’s interesting is within the paradise that is Ruby, there is also this conflict between the older generation and the younger generation.

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You can purchase On Morrison here and anywhere books are sold.

Cover art includes “Toni Morrison as Song of Solomon” by John Sokol (1981). “PASSAGES: On Morrison” is a production of the Random House Publishing Group.